Cambridge IGCSE: First Language English 0500/22

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Cambridge IGCSE™
FIRST LANGUAGE ENGLISH 0500/22

Paper 2 Directed Writing and Composition October/November 2021
INSERT 2 hours
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*6091380015-I*
● This insert contains the reading texts.

● You may annotate this insert and use the blank spaces for planning. Do not write your answers on the
insert.
This document has 4 pages. Any blank pages are indicated.
DC (MB) 201724
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2
Read both texts, and then answer Question 1 on the question paper.
Text A: Can older workers compete in a youth-obsessed business world?
Many of us dread the thought of getting older. It is human nature to want to keep ourselves looking
and feeling young – just take a look around at the number of different anti-ageing products on
the market. Ageing happens to all of us though, so should getting older really be considered a
disadvantage? Most importantly, how will this ageing process affect our careers or livelihood?
Research suggests that age discrimination is a worldwide issue. Career experts even advise 5
older applicants when applying for a new job not to include their birth date on their CV and
to ‘soften’ job titles they have had so as not to appear over-qualified. If they even make it to
interview, older applicants are often faced with questions such as, ‘Would you be able to work for
a younger manager?’
Long-time employees of a global technology company recently argued that the company had 10
discriminated against them based on their age when it fired them as part of its plan to build an
internal network of young employees. The company has eliminated more than 20 000 employees
aged 40 and over in the last 6 years, referring to them in company meetings as ‘grey hairs’
and ‘old heads’ and labelling them as ‘uncollaborative, technologically unsophisticated, less
innovative and generally out of touch’. 15
Ageism – prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s age – is nothing new. However, it
is gaining new attention because people are living and working longer.
Data suggests that there is a place for older workers in today’s economy. A recent study by
global recruitment specialists found multigenerational teams to be more innovative, resourceful
and preferable to work in. The more age-diverse teams are, the better they perform and the 20
better they connect with customers. Thankfully, ideas about the need for more age diversity are
beginning to change attitudes regarding the role of age in the workplace.
© UCLES 2021 0500/22/INSERT/O/N/21

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Text B: The dumbest generation
In 2008, Ira Wolfe, aged 58, wrote a book. He meant it as a how-to guide for getting people of
different ages to work in harmony. In chapter nine, ‘The Dumbest Generation’, he writes about
the workforce’s youngest members. This article responds to Wolfe’s views.
‘What a difference a few decades can make,’ Wolfe complains. ‘A young student was once
embarrassed and her parents shamed by poor grades. A young worker was remorseful if he
disappointed his boss. No longer.’ Wolfe whines that the basic decencies of past generations
are absent in this one. He criticises a generation who ‘grew up reading blogs instead of books’
and ‘read updates about their friends on social media instead of reading about current events in 5
newspapers’.
Nothing new there then? The ageist argument is that we ‘youngsters’ know more about virtual
reality than about the real world – a recycled nostalgia that each new generation is a disappointing
version of the older, better one.
This story is as old as time. These grey old fogies love to scare themselves with alarming tales of 10
a degenerate youth, but always seem to forget how the narrative turns out: the next generation is
always fine. Capable. Better, even.
Look around. Everything we know – everything humans have ever relied upon, or been
impressed by, or desired – was created by a generation who had been dismissed by the one
before it. If we really worsened over generations, rather than improved, we’d be banging our 15
heads against the ruins of the pyramids. Instead, we built the modern world. Our lives today are
incontrovertible evidence that the ageist grumps who came before us were wrong. All of them.
Every time. Without exception.
Ageism is a complex and nasty jealous monster that closes doors and makes the workplace
uncomfortable, if not downright hostile, to young people. 20
Let me give you some examples from my own experience:

• I teach a computing class at different university campuses. Every time I walk into a new
computer lab, at least one person asks something like: ‘Are you supposed to be in here
without your teacher?’
• I am regularly referred to as ‘inexperienced’, ‘new’, or ‘just starting out’. I have been 25
working in the industry for eight years.
• I was filling in worksheets on my tablet in a communal office space, when I was gently
reprimanded by an elderly colleague for being unprofessional and failing to greet him
as I was ‘too busy texting or whatever on my cell phone’.
Reading this list, I can imagine a sceptic saying, that’s not ageism, but I note a distinct flavour of 30
‘You are so young. Do you really belong here?’ beneath these events. Isn’t it time such attitudes
retired with their owners or went off for a quiet nap?
© UCLES 2021 0500/22/INSERT/O/N/21

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FIRST LANGUAGE ENGLISH 0500/22

● This insert contains the reading texts.

This document has 4 pages. Any blank pages are indicated.

Text A: Can older workers compete in a youth-obsessed business world?

© UCLES 2021 0500/22/INSERT/O/N/21

Text B: The dumbest generation

Let me give you some examples from my own experience:

© UCLES 2021 0500/22/INSERT/O/N/21

© UCLES 2021 0500/22/INSERT/O/N/21

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